issue30

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1010G欢迎拍文 7.26作业

TOPIC: ISSUE30 - "The primary goal of technological advancement should be to increase people's efficiency so that everyone has more leisure time."

The primary goal of technological advancement should be bringing us better lives which means more wealth and more leisure time. To achieve the goal to increase productive efficiency is necessary. It is true that high efficiency will bring more wealth but it does not necessarily bring more leisure time.

To begin with, high efficiency is just a sign of advanced technological standards，it cannot be a real goal. When it comes to a concrete technology, its invention or improvement may in order to increase efficiency in some area. For example, the invention of autos is to decrease time spent on travels between home and workplaces so that increase the efficiency; assembly line in production is created to raise the production efficiency. However when it comes to the whole technologies of society, this improvement, to its essence is to create more social wealth so that the living standard of people is improved. Admittedly, the increasing in technologies saves our time that we can produce more productions. But why we produce so many productions? Because by doing this people’s material demanding can be satisfied. Although living standards include material live and spirit live two aspects, material live is the base of spirit live. So in some respect, improve people’s material live can be regarded as improving people’s living standards.

However, humans are avaricious creatures that they do not contend present wealth. No matter how high the productive efficiency is, humans always eager to product more productions to get higher profits. As a result, nowadays we can almost spend half of time and create the same amount of wealth than in the past several decades, but people are always willing to put the rest of the time into creating double wealth, rather than spend the leisure for my family and friends. As you can see, the efficiency could have brought us more leisure time but this leisure time now be used to get more profits.

Maybe, the situation will be change in the future when material demanding is fully satisfied. Perhaps one day when bosses ask for overtimes, we can answer to him/her: “Now I consider that family is more important than money and I will go for a trip with my family this weekend.” Perhaps only when that day coming we can say that technological advancement gives us more leisure. As to present, we have a long distance from the goal.

In sum, the primary goal of technology development is to bring us better lives. But this goal is hard to attain because humans are avaricious creatures, they always pursue more wealth so that they put all their leisure time to make money instead of enjoy their spirit lives.